Scratch is a free desktop and online multimedia authoring tool that can be used by students, scholars, teachers, and parents to easily create games and provide a stepping stone to the more advanced world of computer programming .

Scratch also encourages students to think creatively, work collaboratively, and reason systematically while they create.

Age 8+

Video

Screenshots

To run Scratch 2, you need a relatively recent web browser (Chrome 7 or later, Firefox 4 or later, or Internet Explorer 7 or later) with Adobe Flash Player version 10.2 or later installed.

Try out these starter projects from the Scratch Team. Look inside to make changes and add your ideas.

The ability to code computer programs is an important part of literacy in today’s society. When people learn to code in Scratch, they learn important strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas.

Scratch allows users to use event driven programming with multiple active objects called “sprites“. Sprites can be drawn — as either vector or bitmap graphics — from scratch in a simple editor that is part of the Scratch, or can be imported from external sources, including webcam.

Version 2.0 of Scratch is currently available online and as a desktop application for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.[1][2] The source code of Scratch 1.x is made available under GPLv2 license and Scratch Source Code License.